Breathe me
by narcissmy
Summary: One shot - Jessie Eden x Thomas Shelby. Mature content. Jessie Eden knew that Thomas Shelby would break her heart from day one. But she knew she would happily offer it up time and again for the chopping block, if she got to see the Gypsy King of Birmingham helpless as a babe in her arms.


Jessie Eden knew that Thomas Shelby would break her heart from day one.

She watched him descend the steps of the town hall and bit her lip to suppress her answering grin to his sardonic smile. Thomas Shelby, MP OBE. However, the grin nearly slid off her face and into the gutter as she watched the thin, dark haired woman descend behind him. Lizzie was everything Jessie was not and the thought sat in her stomach like lead. Her waif like figure stood at around 5 foot 7, her blue eyes piercing. Her face was haughty and angular. Everything was tall and elegant except her swollen belly. Lizzie was carrying his child.

Jessie had never wanted children, had never even entertained the idea. Today, however, the thought of seeing her so full with Thomas Shelby had made her ache in a way she had not expected. She crossed her arms around herself in her fashionably quirky coat, as if she could push the sick feeling down with the pressure of her forearms on her chest.

She was irritated by the dampness on her cheeks and she turned her back as he made to cut through the crowd towards her. She was supposed to go to celebratory drinks at the Garrison, and she knew he'd be annoyed she wasn't there. She wanted to be strong and brave and beautiful, and to walk into the Garrison with her reputation in tact knowing she had never been a whore. She was the better woman, with a purpose, and a brain. She had let him kiss her, that night at Charlie's Yard. He had expressed a desire to lay with her, but she had refused him. She couldn't give herself over, for reasons she couldn't put her finger on.

Something deep inside her had cried out for self preservation that night when his lips had descended on hers. She had revelled in the velvet of his mouth. The sensation of the rough pads of his fingers at the softest skin on top of her stockings. But she had pulled away. He was using desire to manipulate her. He could not outwit her, so he wanted to assert his dominance with sexual manipulation. The irony that that was supposed to be a woman's ace to play was not wasted on her.

So instead of a relationship, they had formed an odd alliance. He had reneged his cut to the men's wages and instead installed equal pay in his factories. He would occasionally join her for dinner, and they would talk about their lives before the war. Sometimes she would cry about her beloved. Sometimes he would comfort her. Sometimes they would go to see a flick, or to Charlie's yard to ride or to see the horses. He never paraded her in public. He spoke animatedly at his brothers, lovingly about his mother and Aunt Pol, and with pure hatred about his father. When he spoke about Grace it was the saddest thing she thought she had ever seen. She knew that look, because she'd worn it on her own face after her beau had gone soft in the head. It had stared back at her forlornly from every mirror.

He didn't touch her in the street and he'd never kissed her again. Sometimes, when he sat in the arm chair by her fire and the light cut him just right across his severely beautiful face, she had hoped that he might. And then she had hated herself in the same instance for even entertaining the thought.

Tommy Shelby hadn't tried at all. And yet, at some point, wrapped up in his stories of war and love and violence, Jessie Eden had fallen in love with him. She vomited into the gutter outside of the council building and strode home. Home to her compact little flat and her compact little life. Home to her record player and her gin.

She was ten sheets to the wind, dancing round her kitchen with a cigarette in one hand and what felt like her 3 billionth gin in the other when the banging on the door started. She changed sides on the vinyl she was playing.

"Alright, keep yer 'air on, I'm coming."

She propped the cigarette in the corner of her mouth and her hand was on the door handle just as it began jostling from the other side.

Tommy Shelby stood in the doorway to her flat. He looked sad as hell and smelled like a brewery. More than sad, he looked angry. He shoved past her.

"Yeah, do come in." She whispered, sarcastically, but she couldn't fight the way her heart squeezed in her chest uncomfortably. His jaw was tight as he took out a cigarette of his own. His hands always shook when he was at rest – a remnant from the war he told her. He had also told her when he was focused and annoyed, the tremor disappeared. Her wide eyes were trained on the hands that could have performed a neuro surgical operation they were so steady.

"Did you not want to come to my party, Jessie?"

He sucked his teeth, and he looked – for all intents and purposes – like a petulant child. She drew her arms around herself, suddenly cold in her thin shirt.

"Aren't you happy for me?"

She swallowed and found her voice.

"No."

"No you didn't want to come, or no you're not happy for me?"

He fixed her with those ridiculously blue eyes. Searching, analysing.

She sucked on her cigarette hungrily and shrugged, realising that it was not for Tommy Shelby to psychically interpret her feelings when she had only opened Pandora's box so recently herself.

"I thought we were friends, Jess."

There was more than sadness in his eyes. There was hurt, too. And dare she say it, rejection? The sheer face of the man. To parade around a harlot in front of her, after trying to seduce her in Charlie's yard and then never trying again for the stubbornness of her past rejection. She bubbled with the famous Eden wrath that had driven her into the offices of Shelby company ltd that day.

"And I thought Lizzie was a whore, and yet there she stood looking like the fucking first lady of America today."

It was Tommy's turn to suck in a breath, and his accent was clipped. He looked confused, his brow furrowed and those gloriously expressive eyes of his darkening, dangerously.

"What the fook has this got to do with our Lizzie, eh?"

"She's not my fucking Lizzie. She's been everyone else's." Jessie's laugh was cruel, and she didn't recognise herself as she headed towards the kitchen unit to pour another gin. His hand on her forearm stopped her.

He spun her roughly, and they were practically nose to nose. They were so close the alcohol in their breath mingled.

"You're drunk." He stated simply, but his hand was still on her arm. The weight and warmth of it was unbearable. He always radiated warmth. He looked down into her face, searching for the answers his head was desperately trying to compute. She stared back, unashamed. She was tired of being Jessie Eden. Tired of carrying the dreams of communism on her back. Tonight she wanted to be Jessie Eden the irrational woman who got butthurt over a boy, didn't tell him about it and then got pissed as hell that he didn't recognise what was going on without any prompting.

His hand found her face. His large, violent hands that had broken men and tunnelled through France.

"I couldn't do it tonight, Tommy."

"Do what? Jessie, why are you crying?"

Gin, she cursed. A mother's ruin.

"I just couldn't stand there and watch you be someone else's for an evening."

"Jessie, that's not fair. You said no. I never promised you…"

"I know, Tommy. And that's why it cuts a little deeper. Because you never, ever tried anything after that stupid bloody night in Charlie's yard. And every night, after you've sat here and weaved your tales and left your fucking smell all over my flat, you fuck off back to someone else and I sit here on my own in the dark."

Her tears were angry and hot now, and she placed her small hands on the centre of his chest and shoved. Hard. He stumbled slightly, but she accredited that more to the sheer amount of alcohol he had consumed rather than her brute strength.

"So fuck off, Tommy. Fuck off back to your whore and just let me stew in my bitterness like any Spinster's allowed to."

His expression had changed. It was stormy. It was dangerous. She eyed him triumphantly. Her gin glass was halfway to her lips when his hand came up to remove it from her grasp. He placed it on the table and the record that was playing scratched pitifully as he removed the needle unceremoniously. He rifled through her vinyl collection and she quirked an eyebrow as the strains of blackbird began playing.

"You never had to be a spinster, Jessie. That was your choice."

He beckoned her to the centre of the room and removed his jacket and waistcoat so he was just in his shirt and breeches. She swallowed at the lines of his collarbone slashed above his shirt. He held out his arms.

She went to him cautiously, and they began to dance.

"I'm giving you a do over." He whispered. His face was so close to hers that she could see the fine smattering of freckles on his nose, which he rubbed softly against her own. "Say yes, Jessie Eden."

She could feel his warm breath ghosting over her lips, and the low tugging in her abdomen told her to say yes. The gin told her to say yes.

"Yes." She whispered, and the press of his full lips to hers started her heart pounding all over again.

Tommy fought to keep control as he slid his lips over hers, again and again. Between each kiss, she would pull back and look at him with those impossible brown eyes. It was the same look that she'd give him when she found something he said interesting, or was waiting to challenge him on something, and it made his cock strain against the front of his trousers.

She could never be controlled, never be tamed. Even now, as his hands held her head, she strained for dominance. She sucked his bottom lip between hers and his hands instinctively went to the bottom of her dress. She smacked his hands away and he thought she would end their lovers dance again, but instead she pushed him to sit on the edge of her bed and stood in front of him.

When her hands went to the buttons that covered her heaving chest, all the moisture drained from his mouth.

Her hands were slow on their decent, teasingly slow. Her dress fell to the floor to reveal a silk chemise so thin that he could see the press of her nipples against the fabric, straining for his touch. Her stockings and garter belt were modest. She was shapely, a woman's figure. Full, high breasts. A small waist flaring into wide hips and solid thighs. Thighs covered by skin the colour of milk. She came to stand between his open legs and he placed his hands on her hips and kissed her stomach through the thin fabric of the chemise, then one chaste kiss below the valley of her breasts.

She put her own hands on his and slid them up from their place on her hips until they lay over her breasts. She didn't recognise the noises that spilled from her mouth as he put his mouth over first one nipple and then the second through the fabric, but she did notice the answering clench between her legs. She was hungry now, and she pushed his hands back down, towards her stockings, but he only reached the end of her chemise and began to inch it up over her head.

When he was confronted with the site of her bare breasts he seemed to short circuit, momentarily, and between palming their weight and pressing hot, opened mouth kisses to her chest, she stood before him, completely naked.

He grabbed her wrists and walked her to her vanity unit, and she immediately recoiled from her naked reflection in the mirror, but he stood behind her and held her wrists at her side, holding her steady with long, kisses to her neck. She mewled, hopelessly, thrashing like a fish caught on the end of a line.

"Look at you."

He ran his arms teasingly down the lily white skin of her arms and she could feel his erection, hot and hard at the base of her back. She reached round with tentative hands to stroke the front of his pants, and he thrust into her small palms expectantly. Then he was smacking her hands away and undoing his fly and releasing himself.

His hands reached around her middle and inched towards the soft curls at the apex of her thighs. When he touched her there he kept one arm wrapped around her middle as he gently teased her with expert fingers, rough and sure but gentle and giving all at once. She ached for him, and her eyes were glazed and her mouth slackened as he put her hands on the vanity in front of him. Pulling on her hair slightly, he forced her to look up at their reflection, and she felt another trickle of warmth between her legs. He had removed his pants and trousers, and he had his erection in his hand as he pumped it, once and then twice.

"Look at us. I want you to remember it."

She felt him nudge her legs open, and the weight of him against her, and then he was inside her.

He made a noise like an animal, and she found she liked it so much that she slid herself forward and then back again to meet his thrust. She was tight. Tighter than he had imagined, and wetter than he'd ever thought possible.

There might have been a place or a witty quip about fucking communism, but Tommy couldn't bring it forward, because everytime she moved back into him and whimpered like he was Christmas and Easter all at once his vision blurred with the effort to stop himself spilling into her.

Abruptly he pulled out of her, and she looked bereft in the mirror for a second before he manoeuvred her onto the bed. He licked at her roughly between her legs and the action alone in comparison with the soft, slow way he slid into her for the second time made her arch her back up off the bed so violently she thought her spine would break.

This was so different to what she had seen in the mirror. His one hand was in her hair, and he looked at her reverently. He did not thrust, but he stroked up inside her body until he was so deep she knew exactly what it felt like to be full of Tommy Shelby and her jealousy exploded into tiny bits of confetti as her orgasm hit her in waves.

When he had finished he cradled her to him on his chest, and they shared a solitary cigarette. He stubbed it out and promptly fell asleep. His face was so relaxed with trust and completion she felt her heart twist and swell in her chest.

Jessie Eden knew that Thomas Shelby would break her heart from day one. But she knew she would happily offer it up time and again for the chopping block, if she got to see the Gypsy King of Birmingham helpless as a babe in her arms.


End file.
